Mark-Oliver Casper: Social Enactivism. On situating higher-level cognitive states and processes. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter 2018

Social enactivism is a philosophical theory which, through the analysis of discursive practice, aims at explaining how high-level cognitive conditions and processes emerge. The fundamental tenets of this theory are based on enactivist and (neo)pragmatist principles. Therefore, the emphasis is not on the purely linguistic understanding of discourse but on its structural interaction with technology, that is created by man himself, in the context of which the discursive performance takes place. This perspective addresses not only a blind spot in the international debate about "situated cognition" but also a current problem in the philosophy of mind.

Krzysztof Dolega: Content and Consciousness in predictive processing accounts

Krys addresses the question how to account for consciousness within a predictive processing framework. One of the main promises of the framework is its ambition to offer a unified explanation of all cognitive functions. If this is the case, then predictive processing must carry serious implications for the way consciousness is construed and understood. However, as his research has revealed, there seems to be a deep disagreement about the relationship between the personal level experience and the sub-personal processes at the core of the framework. In order to further investigate the relationship between consciousness and the posits of the framework it is crucial to understand what the contents of sub-personal processes are, as well as what relation they stand in to the contents of phenomenal experience. Part of the discussion is thus to determine the representational content of the probabilistic states and structures postulated by predictive processing.

Judith Martens: Joint Action, Control and Coordination

In her dissertation, Judith develops a comprehensive theory of Joint Action, focusing on the aspects of control and coordination. She distinguishes different types of coordination that characterize joint action, arguing for a multidimensional space in which we should understand the jointness of an action. She arrives at this conclusion based on an extensive study of our understanding of the distinction between automatic and non-automatic processes. She further discusses the impact on our theorizing in philosophy of action and philosophy of collective intentionality by studying heuristic processes, naturalistic decision-making and skill acquisition. The discussion of the automaticity/non-automaticity divide serves two purposes. Firstly, the distinction between automatic and non-automatic processes, and a move away from a strict dichotomy has its impact on theories of action and collective intentionality. Secondly, she models the jointness in joint action in a similar way as we currently model our understanding of automatic and non-automatic processes: changing the model from a dichotomy towards a multidimensional space based on several distinctions that are better understood as gradual distinctions rather than strict dichotomies. To accommodate such a view she takes inspiration from recent theories of skillful action. Three main characteristics that she focuses on within this multidimensional space are coordination, control, and togetherness.

Alfredo Vernazzani: The problem of psychoneural isomorphism

Alfredo analyzes the concept of psychoneural isomorphism, the claim that between the “psychological” and the “neural” there must be an isomorphism, i.e. a structural correspondence. The concept was put forward at the beginning of the 20th century by the Gestalt psychologists, but it has never been thoroughly clarified, although the idea is prominent in contemporary debates about the mind-body problem. His cinclusion is that the idea of psychoneural isomorphism cannot drive discoveries in psychology or neuroscience, and in particular, it does not play a fruitful heuristic role in the research on the neural correlates of consciousness. However, despite not providing explanations, it may help in developing precise specifications and identifications of explananda, or phenomena to be explained. His focus is on visual perception and the discussion involves extensive discussion of philosophical and empirical literature on the nature of perception, metaphysical issues of perceptual objects, and and extensive methodological criticism of the notion of a neural correlate of the contents of consciousness.

Elmarie Venter: Perceiving Agents. On the perception of Self and Other in the predictive processing framework

Elmarie investigated the nature and place of the cognitive agent – the self – and its capacity to perceive itself and other agents. She combines some central tenets of the situated account of perception and cognition with the predictive processing framework (PP) to reach a new description of the role of the self in perceptual experiences. She argues that concerning the account of self, it is not sufficient to hold, like Hohwy & Michael (2017) and Newen (2018), that self and body are simply represented in the hierarchical generative model in the brain and subject to constant updating based on prediction error signaling. These accounts can only account for the self-as-object. She highlights the important distinction between self-as-subject and self-as-object, since we can represent ourselves in both dimensions, with our body playing a mediating role by being both, an object in the world and an agentive subject. Self-as-subject is also always involved in perception: it is (but only implicitly) co-represented even when the self is not part of the explicit intentional content of a perceptual state. It needs to be integrated into the predictive processing framework. Conceived as subject, the body is a necessary feature of the self and endows the agent with a spatio-temporal perspective on the world. In an important respect, the agent not only has a model of the immediate environment, but also must be seen as being a model of this environment, given the sensorimotor capacities facilitating the range of action possibilities. The agent is a special model of the world in virtue of optimization and prediction error minimization.